The police entered the door of a school in Alfortville and the television news projected the images and words of the scandalized parents of students into the living rooms. “School is sacred,” we heard them repeat. Obvious good faith, sincere emotion. How can we not think that their bewilderment rings true? By perhaps noting a first paradox, an error, one would dare, of temporality. It was a schoolboy accused of harassment that the police came to pick up this Tuesday, September 19. School bullying, the evil of the century? A phenomenon that is growing, at the very least. Which concerns the students of course, their teachers, their parents, and even the highest levels of administration and the political world. Denouncing it to prevent it has become the priority fight, the one for which we repeat that we must be firm, intractable, so that it stops and so that the harassers understand that a block stands before them which will hunt them down at every turn. Shouldn’t we then rejoice at the arrest of a harassing schoolboy, even in class in front of his classmates? Should school, the place of tragedy for the victims, be that of impunity for the aggressor? Untenable.
Then, there is the deep paradox, the one that emerges after years of demanding the right to bring society in all its forms into educational establishments. Here are the parents of students who demand more porosity between them and the walls of the school, who sometimes force their way in to come and argue with a teacher, or to question the programs and methods. There are cell phones that common sense prohibits and that other parents absolutely want to see in their children’s bags, for always excellent reasons, safety above all. It is also the students themselves who, in the name of their identity, of the sovereignty of their “self” under construction, widen their eyes when we whisper “uniform” and demand to cross the threshold of their colleges or their shrouded high schools. of their political, religious commitments or dressed as they wish and too bad if the outfit resembles that of their Saturday evening more than the one, admittedly perhaps a little duller, that one wears to study.
Let us also rejoice in the evolution of teachings which integrate the ecological emergency, prevention against multiple forms of violence and discrimination, but show themselves, in certain places, hesitant when it comes to hammering home the words secularism or civic-mindedness. .
The voices that rise against these new school habits and customs are quickly brushed aside, “reactive”, “outdated”, they are told. School must now allow those who attend it to celebrate their individuality and engage with society as a whole. Here is the school overwhelmed, forced to vacillate between sensitivities, ideals, emotions and increasingly incapable of imposing rigor, of restoring the authority that some, however, expect of it. The school is no longer a sanctuary, the school has opened up. Why then deplore the fact that the police come to look for an aggressor student in his class? Justice and conflict cannot stop at the threshold of a school if everything else can enter.